Ken - you are a well-known figure in the 3ds Max world, because of your passion and dedication to the application, and for your out-spoken dialogue within the community. But few of us know how you got into this industry…so how did you get started?

I came by a “non-standard” route. I was at Intel for 10 years where I developed some of the first real-time texture-mapping technology and turned it into a virtual reality system with the help of Sense8 – who I later joined and we then went on to become the major supplier of virtual reality software. We were acquired by Engineering Animation Inc. where I then led our immersive effort with companies like GM, Opel, Ford, etc. I then took a job at Autodesk as part of the Discreet team to help with business development. After a flurry of third-partnering deals for 3ds Max and some other M&E products, I took over product management for 3ds Max around 2005. Since then, I’ve gathered a few other products under my wing.

Given that you hopped onto the oncoming train called 3ds Max development and that there is no such thing as a smooth transition, what do you recall from that experience?

Mostly how quickly things got very busy! I led the charge on the 64b version of 3ds Max which basically meant we had to do a lot of work on the platform and less on “features”. We also had to deal with the confusion that VIZ was generating for customers. These were two fairly monumental efforts to resolve and I believe both have delivered. At least the results tend to speak for themselves – 3ds Max is our most successful product using our metrics. Of course, I’ve had a great team supporting me in all this, Sean Young and Shane Griffith were critical in these achievements.

In your role to lead the product strategy of 3ds Max, what has been your most proud achievement to date?

For me, it has been really two things. One, we’ve led the charge to engage with the community on forums, blogs and elsewhere. We’ve moved from a “don’t spend your work time on the forums” philosophy to a, “you better monitor and respond to the community if you want a job”. Last year, our efforts were clearly acknowledged by the community in a third-party survey that showed a dramatic increase in our “community scores”. We recently released a “community voice” survey of our own with over 1,500 respondents so far. We’re now looking at some tools that would allow us to combine all these forum wishlists into a single thread that people can vote on. All this data will help us drive the product to respond to the requests of users more than we can now. The second big achievement is launching our Excalibur or XBR initiative, which is basically the restructuring of 3ds Max over several phases, and going public with this effort to help customers understand what the long-term looks like for the product. It was a lot of work to structure this idea, sell it internally, then get the story told externally. I think when you are customer focused (our community efforts) and trying to innovate and deliver long term value (XBR) you’ve got the basics covered. Again, the reason 3ds Max has proven so successful with customers is because we have listened, we have delivered and we’ve set the bar high. Customers have lots of options, but they keep choosing 3ds Max. .

What is your future vision for the direction of 3ds Max?

As I said, we launched XBR a year ago to communicate our basic long-term vision of what will be possible with the product. The core elements of XBR are:

• XBR: UI: making our interfaces more direct, intuitive and fun to use
• XBR: Graphics: viewports capable of 10X performance and enhanced visuals
• XBR: Diet: a slimmed down, more configurable platform that loads twice as fast as today
• XBR: Simulation: a unified system for simulating effects
• XBR: Document views: a method of working with data in a more organized fashion
• XBR: Data Management: better ways of managing assets and the 3ds Max file itself

We’re closing in on Phase 2 of the project at this point. XBR will give us a revolutionary platform to continue to invent the future. 3ds Max will remain an “out-of-the-box” tool capable of solving a large range of problems without the need for custom programming. A good example of some of our innovative research in this area is our People Power project which shows how crowds of people can be painted into a scene and “come to life” with a press of a button. We’ve already released a teaser video of this on my blog. We’re working on some seriously tough problems and hopefully we’ll solve them and be able to bring them to users in the future.

3ds Max plays a highly dominant role across the film, games and design viz industries. In your opinion, what makes the software such a success?

There are so many reasons why 3ds Max plays such an important role in all these areas. Part of it is the huge amount of talented individuals that use our product to do amazing things, part of it is a robust community of third-parties that deliver production proven solutions on top of ours, and finally, part of it is the accessibility of our solution and how it delivers on such an incredible breadth of workflows. You can seriously do anything with it that you can imagine.

What do you do when you are not sitting for so many hours in the company?

My favorite pastime is sailing and windsurfing. When I get the chance, I take my family sailing on our 30’ sailboat and find places to relax and unwind. It helps me disconnect since I spend more hours than I probably should in front of a computer. It reminds me that there are greater things in life.

Any funny stories to share about your time in development and/or working with customers?

There was the time that our development manager, Claude Robillard, had us all convinced that with the simple addition of a small DLL dropped into the directory, 3ds Max would be completely multi-threaded. Unfortunately, he was making an early April fool’s joke. I haven’t forgiven him. Another time, we were trying to do some viral marketing but our efforts were completely disrupted when loyal fans of 3ds Max thought there was a “leak” and stepped in to shut it down. We then had to bring them into the “secret” so that we could actually execute on the campaign. Things don’t always work out as expected.

2011 is just a matter of weeks away. With the eyes and ears of the 3ds Max community worldwide at your attention, do you have any messages for us to usher in the coming new year?

We’ll be going public soon with webinars on XBR and our progress to date. It’s important that we keep everyone informed who is on this journey with us. We’re so limited in what we can say about the near-term future, it is much easier to talk about the longer term. In the short-term, I’m convinced that we are working on what users view as their biggest issue and that they will see dramatic improvements from us. Can’t be more specific than that…